--- title: "Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City shares its name with a real Miami neighborhood and a Texas community" url: https://badiyaa.com/liberty-city-gta-real-places-miami-texas/ published: 2026-11-15T06:08:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-15T06:08:00+00:00 section: Gaming publisher: Badiyaa --- # Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City shares its name with a real Miami neighborhood and a Texas community Liberty City, Grand Theft Auto's New York stand-in, shares its name with a historic Miami neighborhood and a small community in Gregg County, Texas. Grand Theft Auto’s most famous city is fictional, but its name is not. There is a real Liberty City in Miami, a historic neighborhood north of downtown, and another in East Texas, a census-designated place of about 2,700 people in Gregg County. Rockstar’s Liberty City is modeled on New York, which makes the overlap a neat bit of trivia: the game’s New York stand-in shares a name with a corner of Miami, the city that inspired the series’ other headline setting, Vice City. ## The game city: New York, three times over Liberty City was one of three cities in the very first Grand Theft Auto in 1997, alongside San Andreas (San Francisco) and Vice City (Miami). It was the first map players could drive around, and it has appeared in more games than any other GTA setting. It has also been rebuilt from scratch twice: - **1997, Grand Theft Auto:** a top-down take on New York City with a Manhattan-style central island and a parody of New Jersey called New Guernsey. - **2001, Grand Theft Auto III:** a looser mix of New York with pieces of Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Detroit, split into Portland, Staunton Island and Shoreside Vale. This version came back in Liberty City Stories. - **2008, Grand Theft Auto IV:** the closest copy of New York yet, with Broker, Dukes, Bohan and Algonquin standing in for Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan. Grand Theft Auto IV even has its own version of Liberty Island, called Happiness Island. Fan wikis suggest the city’s name nods to the Statue of Liberty, though Rockstar has not confirmed where the name came from, so treat that as a theory. ## The real Liberty City in Miami Miami’s Liberty City grew out of a New Deal project. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Liberty Square housing project in 1933, the first public housing of its kind in the American South. Building began in 1934 and residents moved in from 1937. City officials have often called the area Model City, but locals prefer Liberty City. The neighborhood became a center of Black life in South Florida. Boxer Muhammad Ali lived there, and in the 1990s and 2000s it shaped Miami bass and Southern hip hop through Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew, Trick Daddy and Trina. Filmmaker Barry Jenkins and NFL receiver Antonio Brown are also from the area. The 2010 count put its population at 19,725. ## The other Liberty City, in Texas The second real Liberty City sits in western Gregg County, Texas, between Gladewater and Kilgore, about 15 miles southwest of Longview, with Interstate 20 running along its southern edge. It first appeared as a census-designated place in 1990, when it had 1,607 residents. It has grown at every count since. Going from 2,351 people in 2010 to 2,721 in 2020 is a rise of 370 residents, or about 15.7 percent in a decade. Even so, Texas’s Liberty City would fit inside its Miami namesake roughly seven times over. ## How the three compare Put side by side, the real Liberty Cities are a New Deal neighborhood of almost 20,000 people and a quiet Texas community of under 3,000, while the game city is a sprawling three-island or four-borough metropolis built to feel like the largest city in the United States. Rockstar’s next chapter heads south instead. Grand Theft Auto VI returns to Vice City, and our coverage of the [GTA 6 launch trailer and release timeline](https://badiyaa.com/gta-6-launch-trailer-release-date-timeline/) and of [Rockstar’s PS5 and Xbox listing for November 19](https://badiyaa.com/gta-6-pc-release-date-rockstar/) lays out what is coming. The game arrives on consoles on November 19, four days from now. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Grand Theft Auto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_City_(Grand_Theft_Auto)) - [Wikipedia: Liberty City (Miami)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_City,_Miami) - [Wikipedia: Liberty City, Texas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_City,_Texas) *Image: Clément Bardot, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*